THE READING RHEUM: THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1965)

Despite sporting a great title, and having earned a Nebula nomination back in the day, THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH is definitely weak sauce from the illustrious Philip K. Dick.

I read the book something like 20 or 30 years ago, and though I remembered nothing about the story, I recalled a feeling of general disappointment. On occasion re-reading novels many years later can reveal new levels one may not have perceived earlier. Not here, though.

The plot includes all the usual Dick tropes: alien invasion via conceptual manipulation rather than martial attacks, drugs opening "the doors of perception," illusions that may be another form of reality, men with one or more divorces (like Dick himself), psychic technology, and questions about authentic experience. But PALMER fails because its characters are bland and uninvolving.

"Pre-cog" Barney Mayerson is the starring character, and like most of the others, he lives in a sort of futuristic version of Madison Avenue promotional concerns. Most of the other characters are significant because of their relation to Mayerson-- his boss Leo Bulero, his ex-wife, and his current girlfriend-- but in his best books, Dick has an unparalleled ability to flesh out the lives of even support-characters. But the monotony of the faux Madison Avenue milieu makes all of the characters seem flat and undistinguished. This particularly hurts the novel in Mayerson's case, for he seems just like an unfeeling jerk for the early chapters of the book-- but by the novel's middle, he experiences a great sense of guilt over an action he fails to take. Thus, when Dick devotes the rest of the novel to Mayerson's desire to atone for his wrongs, the emotion seems forced.

The one character outside Mayerson's sphere is the legendary explorer Palmer Eldritch, who has made contact with aliens in the Proxima galaxy and is attempting to market on Earth a hallucinatory drug made from alien lichen. But the hallucinogen has effects far beyond those of anything on Planet Earth, and Mayerson eventually suspects that Eldritch is either the pawn of an alien invasion, or a simulacrum of the original explorer. Like the androids of Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, Eldritch possesses three signs of his inhuman nature-- in Palmer's case, artificial eyes, jaw, and arm. The novel calls these "stigmata" only once, and they never take on any associations with what "stigmata" signify, either in ancient or mainstream Christianity. Despite Dick's liberal references to Christianity in PALMER, his character's religions crises fare no better than the characterizations, and on the whole I hypothesize that Dick wrote the novel without adequate planning. The previous year the author wrote the less heralded MARTIAN TIME SLIP, which despite its absence of critical approval is a superior work in every way.